FC Dallas midfielder David Ferreira was voted Major League Soccer's Most Valuable Player on Friday, November 19 at Toronto's BMO Field. Ferreira and his Dallas teammates will play in MLS Cup Final in Toronto on Sunday, November 21 (TSN2, 8:30 p.m.)

It was the 23rd Psalm.

It begins with the worlds ‘The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.’

MLS Most Valuable Player David (pronounced Dah-vid) Ferreira was reading it with some teammates, not long ago.

Nothing unusual about that, except that it was halftime of an MLS playoff game against the LA Galaxy.

That done, he stood up and announced his intentions.

“I am not coming back through this door a loser,” he said.

He didn’t. FC Dallas, who play the Colorado Rapids Sunday night in the MLS Cup, returned  3-0 winners. Ferreira’s was the winning marker.

Ferreira outdistanced LA’s Edson Buddle and Jose’s Chris Wondolowski to gain the award which uses input from players, coaches, executives and media. This is his first MVP title. In fact, Preki is the only player to have earned the honor twice.

Ferreira gives his dimensions as five-foot-five, 152 pounds, but that is only true if he wears a special lead-lined kit.  Still, size has done little to dissuade the Columbian who scored eight goals and recorded 13 assists during the season.  He was the most fouled player in the league but played every minute of the FC Dallas season but one.

“He’s solid, he’s quick. He’s got fight,” said DFC coach Schellas Hyndman.  “The one area that surpasses everything in a professional athlete is character. Talent can only take you so far. Character will keep you there. He exemplifies that.”

Ferreira, 31, has garnered 35 caps. A native of Santa Marta in the country’s northern tip, he grew up idolizing another football prodigy, Carlos Valderrama.

“I liked him when he was so peaceful when he made his passes,” Ferreira said.

Peacefulness is a theme to which Ferreira often  returns . When asked how a player his size can prosper against men who are so much bigger, he says through an interpreter: “it’s all based on the tranquility you have in the moment.”

Hyndman, meanwhile,  says deprivation is an excellent finishing school.

“I think the players coming out of Central America, they find life a little bit harder,” he said. “Life in Columbia may not be as easy as it is here so they are ingrained to be professionals at very young age. Everything is so serious because it’s a livelihood. It’s ‘how long can I last and how can I take care of wife, my children, and give them the life that I didn’t have?“

No argument there but the tiny Columbian is just as adept setting up goals as finishing them. Desperation, at least the kind that leads to wasted chances, is absent from his game.

He is the rarest of players, the kind playing chess while everyone is playing checkers.

The killing moment is where he finds his quiet.  At that moment he is, in every way, where everybody wants to be.